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Regionalism And American Legal History: The Southern Experience, James W. Ely, Jr., David J. Bodenhamer

Vanderbilt Law Review

Commentators surprisingly have failed to focus on the influence of regionalism in the development of American law. To be sure, numerous books and articles examine state law and its local application or explore the treatment by several states of a particular legal concept or category of laws. But attempts to define regional attitudes toward law or to analyze regional differences in legal practice are almost nonexistent. So foreign has the topic of regionalism been to scholarship in American legal history that Lawrence Friedman's acclaimed synthesis, A History of American Law,' contains no discussion of regionalism or its close relative,sectionalism. Even …